The SGI Development Environment

SGI provides a complete collection of facilities to help programmers take advantage of the unique capabilities of the SGI platform. Some of these facilities take the form of assorted libraries that perform various tasks, while others are simply stylistic guidelines. For example, SGI supports an extension of the Motif Style Guide, and also builds on the ICCCM protocols for data exchange between applications. The SGI platform also provides an extended set of Motif-style widgets that can be used to develop applications, and supports various high-level services, including a help system and network licensing.

The ViewKit library ties together all these separate pieces into an integrated set of classes that supports complete SGI-style applications with as little work as possible. For example, even the simplest ViewKit application is fully integrated with SGI's on-line help system. Programmers do not have to write a single line of code to provide full on-line help for a ViewKit application.

Figure 1 and Figure 2 illustrate the difference between the architecture of applications developed using the assorted libraries supported on the Silicon Graphics platform and the architecture of an application based on the ViewKit framework.

Figure 1. Traditional application architecture.

Figure 2. The ViewKit "upside down library" architecture.

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